NextFolio

NextFolio is a social portfolio management experience where young investors learn to succeed in the financial world.

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Inspiration

When looking through the Hackathon sponsors, we the financial sponsors BlackRock and Capital One stood out. Our experience has shown that many young adults do not have ready access to comprehensible and engaging financial education. We aim to provide an entertaining and social portfolio management platform that is educational and fun at the same time.

What it does

NextFolio allows users to compete with their peers in achieving the best portfolio performance. Users input their stock portfolio through the NextFolio website. Users can then follow their peers' portfolios and compete for the highest revenue. Users can learn optimal trading techniques by observing the successful strategies employed by other users.

How we built it

Our platform currently comprises a website and server backend. The website is built through a combination of HTML, Javascript, CSS, and D3. The backend is written in Java using the Spring Boot framework using a PostgreSQL database.

Challenges we ran into

While making our website, we ran into difficulties figuring out API usage, as well as a number of visualization issues. On the backend server, the most challenging component was determining how to make API requests as we had little to no experience with the sponsor's APIs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very pleased with our data visualization techniques, which are very important in the financial world. In addition, our usage of financial APIs to obtain security information and revenue growth data took significant effort to implement.

What we learned

Our team started without a large working knowledge of website and server development. During the span of the past 36 hours, we were able to learn the basics of full stack development, from organizing HTML divs and making SQL queries.

What's next for NextFolio

What does the future hold for NextFolio? We plan to further build up this fledgling website into a full-on financial social-media platform. We will improve our security such as implementing 2-factor authentication among other features. Furthermore, we will expand beyond just stocks and create the functionality to invest in other financial securities such as bonds, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies. We also plan on enabling users to purchase assets on this platform by linking their brokerage accounts.

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